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By Stiliana Milkova Rousseva

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As I wrote in the first installment of “Workshop Notes,” this fall I am teaching a new Comparative Literature course at Oberlin College — a semester-long workshop on reviewing translated literature. My students read literary works in translation, analyze and interpret them, research them and then write about them, paying attention to how the translator’s voice shapes the text. As students are gaining confidence in reading and reviewing works in translation, we turn to retranslation and reviewing works that have multiple translations. After reviewing Izidora Angel’s translation of Nataliya Deleva’s novel Four Minutes, students worked on reviews of the two existing translations of contemporary Italian writer Alessandro Baricco’s Silk.

Published in Italy in 1996, Silk (Seta) was an immediate bestseller. It was translated in English in 1997 by Guido Waldman – a respected translator and editor whose titles include Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Giovanni Bocaccio’s The Decameron. Retranslated by none other than Ann Goldstein in 2006, Silk accompanied the film adaptation, an international co-production that didn’t receive much acclaim. Despite the film’s lackluster fate, the retranslation in English of a contemporary literary work by a living author less than 10 years after its first translation, is a notable event. When we speak of retranslations in English, we usually refer to a canon of venerable classics or at least to established texts that hold sway over our Anglophone (and Western) literary imagination.

Intrigued by this seeming canonization of Baricco’s Silk through retranslation, my students embarked on a comparative analysis of Waldman’s and Goldstein’s texts. They set out to uncover the story each translation tells, to use Susan Bernofsky’s description of translation as storytelling (2023), and to consider how each translator’s voice adds to the original’s complexity, offering its own vision or interpretation. Students also set out to prove that a reviewer need not understand the source language to write a thoughtful and respectful discussion of a translated, or indeed retranslated work. The three reviews featured here represent a selection of the students’ essays on Alessandro Baricco’s Silk.

“‘Like Grasping Nothing’: Revisiting Alessandro Baricco’s Silk,” by Annie Wyner

“The Qualities of Silk in Ann Goldstein’s and Guido Waldman’s Translations of Silk,” by Anna Wenzel

“Invisibility of the Foreign: The Double Life of Alessando Baricco’s Silk in English Translation,” by Hanna Alwine

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Stiliana Milkova Rousseva is a Bulgarian-born scholar, translator, and exophonic writer in Italian. She edits Reading in Translation and directs the Comparative Literature Program at Oberlin College where she also teaches courses on literature and on literary translation. Stiliana coordinates Oberlin College’s minor in literary translation.

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Works Cited

Bernofsky, Susan. 2023. “Translation as Storytelling.” In Galasso, Regina, ed. This is a Classic. Translators on Making Writers Global. Bloomsbury Academic.